El Nino is coming for our skating rinks (and that’s not all)

Robert McLeman is chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Chris Fletcher is chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo.

If you haven’t heard, we just entered into the strongest El Nino event in living memory, and with it will come unusual – sometimes extreme – winter weather. In many parts of the world, it will cause losses of homes, lives and livelihoods. For people living in Canada and the northern U.S., one of the more visible effects will be a lack of outdoor skating rinks this winter in places you might ordinarily expect to find them.

Outdoor skating rinks are a useful indicator of how winter weather responds to variations and changes in the climate. Since January, 2013, outdoor rink makers across North America have provided data about skating conditions on more than 1,800 rinks to a citizen science project called RinkWatch, which is operated at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont. The RinkWatch website’s homepage map shows that outdoor rinks are made across a wide swathe of the continent, in most populated areas of Canada (as one might expect) and with dense clusters around American rink-making hotbeds like the suburbs of Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis and New York. Most readers will be aware that water freezes at temperatures below 0 C, but RinkWatch data show that much colder temperatures are needed to keep a rink skateable (a daily average below -5 C).

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Because of El Nino, temperatures in many of these traditional outdoor rink-making areas will not be cold enough to make a rink this winter, and folks who manage to get one started will experience frustrating mid-winter thaws and heavy precipitation events that ruin their skating surfaces. Good skating conditions will be found only at altitude (think western Montana and the suburbs of Denver) and at higher latitudes (such as northern Alberta and Saskatchewan). We know this because RinkWatch participants reported similar conditions during the winter of 2015-16, the last time Earth experienced a record-breaking El Nino.

El Nino events are a natural phenomenon that occur every five years or so, triggered by weak trade winds over the Pacific Ocean that allow warm surface water to migrate from east of Australia to the ordinarily cold ocean off the west coast of South America. This sudden appearance of warmer water creates disruptive weather patterns around the world, because the oceans and atmosphere are coupled systems: Changes in one stimulate changes in the other. Unusual monsoonal precipitation patterns bring hotter and drier conditions in areas with tropical rainforests, causing frequent severe wildfires. In North America, the jet stream moves northward, carrying Arctic air with it and allowing milder, wetter air from farther south to follow in its wake. It’s this northward shift of warm, moist air that makes winter challenging for outdoor rink makers.

Scientists encourage people to view El Nino events as harbingers of the weather we can expect in coming decades as greenhouse gases continue to warm our climate. The current El Nino event is expected to boost average global temperatures temporarily by 0.2 C to 0.3 C, roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding the climate system to the 2050s. By that decade, January temperatures will in the average year be too mild to make it worthwhile building an outdoor rink in most cities that host a National Hockey League franchise, with the exceptions of Edmonton and (possibly) Winnipeg and Minneapolis. NHL fans in the Original Six cities of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Montreal, New York and Toronto, who often sneer at the league’s expansion into the Sun Belt, will also find themselves on the southern side of the rink-making frontier.

The inability to skate outdoors is among the less severe consequences of a strong El Nino and a rapidly warming planet. Just the same, the ability to skate (or to toboggan or ski) in the darkest months of winter is something that many North American communities have treasured for generations. The cultural loss will be painful, as will the social, physical and psychological effects for families whose backyard and neighbourhood rinks are where their kids and their neighbours’ kids play, learn and live each winter. Despite this unusually mild winter, outdoor rinks should reappear in subsequent winters as temperatures return closer to normal. But forecasts for the coming decades suggest they will eventually disappear for good because of our collective inability to control greenhouse gas emissions. Enjoy and cherish the rinks while they last.